Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind—a subject of folklore and awe, part-elemental god, part-aerial demon blasting through the sublime landscape of Northern England since the dawn of time. Through the stories of those who’ve obsessed over Helm, an extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm — and the farmer’s daughter who fiercely loved Helm. But now Dr. Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm.
Hall’s breath proves just as powerful and unpredictable as Helm’s ... Helm is as fascinating as it is challenging. The momentary irritation of being yanked from one unfinished story is tempered by the magnetic allure of falling into another one just as engaging ... Hall captures the turbulent, unwieldy forces of meteorological chaos and human desire that we can’t control, can barely even track.
Mischievous ... This inventive, ambitious, often witty storm system of a novel spans centuries ... Hall is both playful and serious, bringing everyday warmth and droll humor to substantial ideas. In Helm, she commands an impressive range of idioms ... Hall salts her solemn banquet with the comedy that’s inextricable from mortal life — or from English life, anyway.
Each strand of Helm has...concentration; the characters and voices could stand alone, but they flow together into something deep and rich ... Hall’s work on place, and especially this corner of England, has always been virtuosic, a tough and supple poetry anchored in decades of attention to Cumbrian land and plants and skies ... Above all it is the wind itself that holds this vastly ambitious, serious – but also often playful and ironic – book together. Some might find Helm’s voice initially a little arch, a little unplaced relative to the human voices, but it grows on you.
